The painting of Ellen De Meutter drifts on an inner flux that is de-picted in a language in which our perception of reality is altered into an alert way of looking at 'scenes' where 'something' is happening without any precise finality. The recent paintings of Ellen De Meutter slide ever so slowly towards a 'language' in which abstraction becomes the heart of the matter, the heart of a story, it is true, but only with a semi-figurative inception. With bravado, she is able to 'frame' our look on a detail of actions that happen mostly outside the 'frame' of the painting. A series on budding sexuality is reduced to remarkable compositions in which bodies become fragments and the letters 'ESX' in the centre, at best, betray the vague content of the painting.
In contrast to a current mainstream in Flemish painting, it is not Ellen De Meutter's intention to tell stories or anecdotes, but to use 'insinuating' motives as an alibi for experimenting with 'arranging' different actions, different treatments of paint one next to the other. With the greatest ease, she knows how to make transparent and almost evenly applied passages of paint collide with thick strokes that place the accents. It is as if she effortlessly knows how to bridge the gap between the fore- and the background of a painting. In the distance sounds the echo of a surreal view of the world; this does not mean that Ellen De Meutter dismisses the world. Yet it does mean that she folds back 'her' world onto itself, into a solid mass of colour from which, very slowly, vague contours emerge, which safeguard our expectations about looking at an image.
(Luk Lambrecht, 2006)